Discourse Analysis

The paper addresses the way people elaborate and share resentment against immigrants on social networks. Since its beginning in 2008, the financial crisis established itself as the main topic in Italian media discourse, monopolizing almost the whole public debate. Although anti-immigrant discourse is not a novelty in the European public sphere, the long recession in Italy has strengthened this kind of feeling. At the same time social networks, especially Facebook, grew in popularity and importance, establishing itself as a powerful means of sharing information, objectives and opinions.

The corpus of our analysis is composed by status updates and images posted on four Facebook public pages related to anti-establishment or generic protest topics. Moreover, this kind of material easily circulates on other more general groups and pages and is frequently shared by ordinary users on their personal profiles.

The analysis explores some of the main issues in racist discourse (illegal arrivals, crime, social struggle and denial of racism). In our study we take into account lexical items, rhetorical forms (metaphors, hyperbole) and arguments employed to set immigrants as antagonists of ordinary Italian people. Our aim, therefore, is to understand how new media help to strengthen racist discourse in everyday interaction

Key words – Racist discourse, social networks, Facebook, discourse analysis, web discourse

U radu će se ispitati neki aspekti paradoksa prisutnih u suvremenom klapskom diskursu. Pod pojmom ʻsuvremeni klapski diskursʼ podrazumijeva se sveukupnost teksta, glazbe, videospota, načina izvođenja i re/prezentacije (modernih) klapskih pjesama kao društvenog fenomena te njegova šira kontekstualna uključenost. Iako je paradoks moguće uočiti na svim spomenutim razinama, ovdje ću se osvrnuti na neke primjere tekstualnih paradoksa moderne klapske pjesme te na paradokse vezane uz same pojmove baštine i autentičnosti moderne klapske pjesme.

(This paper looks at aspects of some paradoxes in modern klapa discourse. The term ‘modern klapa discourse’ comprises the (interrelated) unity of klapa texts, music, music videos, and performance which cannot be separated from their wider social context. Though it is possible to detect and investigate paradoxes at each of the aforementioned levels, in this paper two specific paradoxes are focused upon. First, the paradox of acknowledging changes occurring from efforts at safeguarding (living) heritage/culture in relation to Dalmatian klapa is discussed. Second, two texts are discussed to address issues concerning the notion of authenticity in modern klapa along with some of the paradoxes that arise as a result.)

Este trabajo analiza el recorrido que establecen los aprendientes de
ELE coreanos a la hora de utilizar la morfología verbal para narrar hechos
pasados desde el componente oral de la lengua. Partiendo de los postulados
de la hipótesis del aspecto y de la hipótesis del tiempo pasado por defecto, se
examina el discurso de 60 estudiantes universitarios distribuidos entre los niveles
A2 y B2+ del Marco común europeo de referencia para las lenguas. Los
resultados obtenidos revelan que, si bien en nuestro corpus se registra una
mayor tendencia en el uso de los tiempos verbales según los postulados de la
segunda hipótesis analizada, existe un grupo de verbos estativos, concretamente
en los verbos de sentimiento, en el que se cumplen las predicciones de la
hipótesis del aspecto. Estos datos permiten confirmar que al seleccionar la
morfología verbal para construir un discurso narrativo personal los aprendientes
no solo se guían por la información proporcionada por la interacción entre lexema
verbal y los tiempos del sistema verbal español sino también por la semántica
propia de los verbos, es decir, por su denotatum.

Although regularly contested and rejected, the idea of a ‘grammar of comics’ continues to be applied to the analysis of comics in many disciplines and frameworks. The motivation for this is the evident regularity and systematicity exhibited by the comics medium as a form of expressive communication. Less commonly realized is that nowadays there are powerful descriptive mechanisms developed in approaches to verbal texts and linguistics that do not require the assumption of ‘grammar’ to explain productive structural regularity. This is important for the future study of comics because the notion of ‘grammar’ is in many respects deeply problematic when applied outside of its home area of natural language. In this article we demonstrate how more recent accounts of dynamic discourse provide a more appropriate set of mechanisms for talking about visual media such as comics. These mechanisms allow us to naturally relate panel, page and multiframe compositions as well as their combinations. By critical discussion of examples addressed in the literature, we show how these constructs also entail treatments of panel transitions that move beyond overly tight linking of panels and panel transitions to time and space and offer a methodologically sound way of identifying units of analysis in comics in general.

Preterit verbs and temporal/deictic adverbials are examined and shown to indicate the occurrence of quasi-narrative structures in non-narrative discourse. A statistical analysis of the occurrence of preterit tense verbs and temporal/deictic adverbials in the Brown E and K subcorpora reveals that, although narrative texts have a significantly greater concentration of preterit verb and temporal/deictic adverbial tokens, the statistical insignificance of these tokens in non-narrative discourse is significant, because it reveals that these grammatical elements specifically trigger the presence of quasi-narrative text spans. Qualitative analysis reveals that quasi-narrative structures are important stylistic tools used by composers as rhetorical highlighting devices that give non-narrative texts a personalized register, allow material in non-narrative texts to become more "vivid," and allow composers to manipulate readers in subtle ways. Ultimately, the data used in this analysis confirm and expand the findings of Longacre's (1976) earlier investigation of the function of narrative structures in non-narrative discourse.

Traditional sociodialectal analyses of the occurrence of positive anymore in the lexicon of US Midland dialect English speakers posit that positive anymore functions as a near-synonym to the temporal adverbial nowadays. In these analyses, positive anymore is analyzed as being merely a stigmatized regional variant of nowadays for these speakers, used with the following meaning: the activity or situation referred to “was not formerly true, but has come to be characteristic of the present” (Murray, 1993:174). On this view, both positive anymore and nowadays appear to be maintained in the lexicon of speakers because anymore is the heavily stigmatized variant, and therefore, users actively maintain both variants so that they can avoid usage of anymore in situations where use of the standardized variant nowadays carries prestige (Wolfram and Christian, 1976; Murray, 1993; Cassidy, 1985).
In the present analysis, I challenge this traditional view of the distribution of positive anymore and nowadays. Using the theoretical framework of pragmatics to conduct an analysis of the variable distribution of these items, I demonstrate that speakers of the Midland dialect maintain use of both items to indicate pragmatic contrasts that result in the specific usage of one item or the other in utterances that are highly sensitive to the presuppositional inferences triggered by each of these items. Using data elicited via sociolinguistic interviews with 10 US Midland dialect speakers, and based on these speakers’ evaluations of sentences in which the items occur, I demonstrate that a more detailed analysis, which reveals these pragmatic contrasts, can be obtained by investigating the variety of discourse contexts in which each item occurs. 
Specifically, my analysis demonstrates that both positive anymore and nowadays are presuppositions indicating a change of state, but the difference between their pragmatically acceptable uses centers around that degree of the change of state that each conveys. I argue primarily that, in discourse contexts in which a change of state is not implicitly marked, the occurrence of either is pragmatically acceptable, hence the commonly held conclusion that positive anymore and nowadays function as synonyms. However, as my analysis also demonstrates, in highly specific discourse pragmatic contexts in which a change of state is implicitly marked, subtle differences in meaning between positive anymore and nowadays become apparent. In these contexts, positive anymore triggers the presupposition that a change of state has been completed, while nowadays triggers the inference that only a partial change of state has occurred.
Via the course of my analysis, I also investigate the impact of positive and negative polarity items on the occurrence of nowadays and positive anymore when they are distributed in complementary contexts. As a result, I posit that the co-variance of positive anymore and nowadays is sensitive to an envelope of variation pertaining to the contexts in which the items can co-occur. The variance exhibited by these items is shown to be a bounded phenomenon, with occurrences of positive anymore deemed increasingly infelicitous by hearers of utterances in which it occurs as the limits of the envelope are reached.

Centred on studies on language and gender, this article presents the results of a discourse analysis that examines the discourse practices of some of the most representative EFL textbooks published in the last decades in Spain. The analysis shows that women were subrepresented in the textbooks published in the last decades of the 20th century. On the
contrary, a very different situation occurs in the materials of the corpus calibrated to The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages since they reveal a balanced representation of sexes1, favouring, in some cases, a positive discrimination approach towards women.

Roundtable on Logic and Rhetoric of Political Discourse (University of Cyprus New Campus, ΧΩΔ02 016, 14:30 – 16:00).

Discussants: Professor Antonis Kakas (UCY), Associate Professor Demetris Portides (UCY), and Dr. Andreas Serafim (OUC/UCY).

This Roundtable will focus on the manner rather than matter of political discourse. Not only will the discussion engage with common fallacies and, more generally, with argumentation schemes in political discourse; but also the discussion will briefly bring up ethos, pathos, and humour, as well as ancient techniques (schemata lexeos) that are still used in politics (e.g. in speeches by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan).

This paper makes an attempt to explain the construction of a newly developed genre called revenge porn flourishing in new media. The study analyzes the patterns of production and display of revenge porn content as well as the mechanisms of the site that archives such materials. The results of this study suggest that the development of such a genre cannot be attributed only to liberatory and/or victimizing effects of the electronic space. Rather, social power structures based on  iscourses like gender, heterosexuality and capitalist patriarchy that exploit the surveillance mechanism of the internet are  ignificantly influencing both individual uses of the internet as well as its apparatus and technologies. These are the major forces contributing to the institutionalization and  ommercialization of revenge porn in new media. This is a case study based investigation that uses both content analysis and discourse analysis as methods to interpret the revenge porn genre in new media.

Dear colleagues,

Please find enclosed the call for papers for the 10th International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis. It will be organised by the CERAPS (Lille 2 University/CNRS/Science Po Lille) in Lille from July 8 to 10, 2015 at the Faculty of Law and Political and Social Sciences and at Sciences Po Lille.

I am personally in charge of panel P17 : "Discourses of fiscal decentralisation and tightened budgetary discipline : How to make Democratic Accountability and Fiscal Adjustments Compatible?" (also enclosed). 

Paper proposals should be uploaded to the website (http://ipa2015.sciencesconf.org/) by February 3, 2015.

We encourage you to disseminate the call for papers among your own networks. For any further queries, please feel free to contact me.

Looking forward to meeting you in Lille,

Sincerely yours,

Maxime Uhoda
Assistant-doctorant au Tax Institute de l'Université de Liège
ULg-Faculté de droit et de science politique
R26, BAT. B31 droit fiscal et droit des finances publiques
boulevard du Rectorat, 7
4000 Liège 1
Belgique
+ 32 4 366 35 08